Snapshots

So much to catch up on.



But first, a memory. This one flooded over me this morning while walking from judiciary square to metro center in the drizzle. My npr story of the day podcast was about the demise of the poloroid camera--how the company had to declare bankruptcy and they have now pretty much stopped making the cameras and the film, so that soon, the polaroid camera will once and for all be added to the crowded graveyard of extinct consumer electronics.



Polaroids are another one of those things that seperate someone like me from the very fresh faces I sometimes work with. Some of whom are now a full decade younger than I am. Playdoh Golem had a twenty-year-old in it. That's more than a decade.



Late-80s babies probably never had a polaroid unless it was for the retro value. They also wouldn't remember a time before the internet and would never have purchased a record album.



That said--the five years that seperate me and C establish him as someone who owned 8-tracks (inherited from an older brother, but still...) and me as someone who only remembers them from garage sales.



Anyhow. Polaroids.



We didn't have a polaroid camera though I am sure I wanted one. I remember knowing that the film was very expensive so you couldn't waste it playing around. But there was a day, on my grandma's lawn, the house on candy lane, and we are taking pictures with a polaroid. I think it must be my aunt's camera. It's a special day and I sort of remember that she is graduating. From highschool? My aunt was about thirteen years older than me, so it's possible. As I remember this the image creates itself in my head and now I am convinced that she is in a graduation gown. This would make me and my brother about five. And maybe they took pictures of us, with our aunt, her in cap and gown. And maybe it was sunny? And we are close to but not underneath the big tree that sat at the foot of my grandma's front lawn.



This is my aunt who passed away in the fall.



Somewhere there are polaroids of her and two smiling five-year-olds in 1980s summer threads.